I'm the founding partner of Proteus International, and author of Growing Great Employees, Being Strategic, and Leading So People Will Follow. You can follow me on Twitter @erikaandersen. My websites are erikaandersen.com, and www.proteus-international.com. I'm insatiably curious. I love figuring out how people, situations and objects work, and how they could work better: faster, smarter, deeper, with greater satisfaction, more affection, and a higher fun quotient.

Great Leaders Don't Predict the Future - They Invent It

I spent the day yesterday with one of my favorite client groups. They’re the senior team of part of a major media company, and they are smart, funny, curious, talented and kind people. The quote above was on the introductory page of a deck they had put together outlining their vision of change for the coming year.

In addition to the fact that they’re such delightful human beings, I love working with this group because they’re actually operating according to this quote. While lots of people in media (and many other industries) are wringing their hands, refusing to engage in real planning because the future seems so unpredictable, and others are blithely setting aggressive financial goals, expecting that doing the same things they’ve always done will somehow get them there, these folks are making the future their own. They’re saying, in effect, “Here’s the direction we think things may be heading – and here’s our response to that.”

I think this distinction between predicting the future and inventing it is an important one. I often get the feeling that we all believe that business success in this day and age depends on having some kind of a crystal ball: on being able to know with a high degree of certainty what’s going to happen, and then create a business solution that’s tailored to that correctly-predicted future. For instance, we assume that Mark Zuckerberg, 10 years ago, somehow magically knew what the world was going to be like in 2013, and said to himself, “Since the world of communication will be hugely centered on socia media in ten years, if I start this now, I can have over a bilion users by 2013.”

No. In 2003, he started something called ‘facemash’ at Harvard, where he was a student. It was a website where he put up photos (which he had hacked from the ‘facebooks’ put out by each of Harvard’s resident houses) of two students side-by-side, and invited other students to rate who was hotter. He got a lot of response, and based on that, decided to write the code for the website that would become FacebookFacebook. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg began writing the code for a new website, known as ‘thefacebook’. He said in an article in The Harvard Crimson that he was inspired to make Facebook from the incident of Facemash: “It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available … the benefits are many.” Within twenty-four hours, [they] had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants.

The site quickly became so popular at Harvard that Zuckerberg and his friends expanded it to other universities and colleges, and then high schools. In September of 2006, Zuckerberg and company opened the site to anyone over the age of 13 with a valid email address.

So: no crystal ball was involved. Zuckerberg did something almost as a lark, and when it got a lot of response it showed him a gap that needed to be filled. He invented a way to fill that gap. The response to his solution catalyzed a realization that there was an even bigger gap than he’d thought: he re-invented his solution to fill that gap. He repeated that process of observation and re-invention for another 7 or 8 years and: voila, Facebook 2013.

Good leaders don’t wait till they’re sure what’s going to happen and then go for it. First of all, it’s impossible: nobody knows for sure – especially these days – what’s going to happen.

Good leaders get clear about what they and their people are best at and most passionate about. They gather as much information as is feasible about where things might be heading, and they reflect on it – together with their folks – as objectively as possible. Then they head in a direction that takes best advantage of their strengths to meet key needs they believe will arise, given what they understand about current trends. They invent new models, approaches, products or solutions that will serve a future need, and in so doing, they have a hand in inventing that future.

That’s what my clients were doing yesterday. It’s both daunting and exhilarating; it requires courage, curiosity, and resilience. But as pioneers of all sorts have discovered over the centuries, it’s the only way to find a new world.

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Loved this article, Erika — thank you. Reminded me of another favorite quote of mine, by the French Nobel Prize winner Andre Gide: “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

In my own arena of thought leadership I find it important to stress that this is not about having a crystal ball but experimenting with small, incremental steps. As we write in our award-winning book #Thought Leadership Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign (tweet #8): “A hallmark of true thought leadership is the confidence to take the route that 99.9 percent of industry experts don’t even see. Will you?”

Thanks for an inspiring article. I can very much relate to the courage, curiosity, and resilience message. The other side of this optimistic article is a type of response often receive from prudent prospective partners about being “an unproven market”. How can one expect a proven market in the field of innovation?

Unless you have the budget to push true innovation to the market, the best other option is indeed experimentation with small, incremental steps.

A Black Swan (per Nassim Taleb) is a highly improbable event that has a large impact. While I believe that efforts from small groups are significant to develop ideas, most really important “discoveries” (per Taleb)are a segue (or serendipitous) from the planned course, e.g. Pasteur’s “discovery” of penicillin. I’m in the process of reading Taleb’s book…it’s a good read and rationally turns conventional wisdom on its ear (so far); it also validates my life experiences when I look at them objectively.

Great clarification, thanks. And I’ve noticed the same thing: a huge number of important shifts and discoveries aren’t based on accurate prediction of the future, but instead arise from heading in a direction hoping for a particular result – and then finding something entirely different than you expected. The key is that ‘observe and re-invent’ loop – Pasteur and penicillin being a great example.